Art Exhibit to Open at Duquesne

Duquesne University will open an art exhibit by Andrew Hairstans called A Model for Asylum Tuesday at the Les Idees Gallery on Duquesne’s campus.

Hairstans said the exhibit focuses on a housing project in Glasgow, Scotland. He said the project has to do with modernist British housing and how it is used by asylum seekers.

“I became interested in the area because originally they were at one point the tallest housing complexes in Europe and they were also used to house at one point they were used to house asylum seekers from all over the world really."

This is not the first art exhibit that Duquesne has hosted, but it is the first one presented by the art history department. The exhibit fits into the department’s service learning where students go into the community for hands-on learning. Director Julia Sienkewicz’s students have been going into Hazelwood and studying architecture, and she said the theme of A Model for Asylum fits well into their curriculum.

“It’s very different to look at a work and be told what it means by an art historian, or a critique or a text book [than] to get to actually listen to an artist and to interact with an artist about their work,” said Sienkewicz.